Google really is on the war path. I started to work on a Google Penguin post but decided to wait a while and do a little more analysis as the onslaught of penguin posts was a little disorientating.

But the world of SEO is changing. Not just in terms of what tactics are best, but I feel Google is helping to shape a new mindset in SEO’s, that outing your competitors maybe the quickest way to get viable results.

This post will take a quick look at the story of iAcquire’s ban and 5 takeaways you can incorporate into your own SEO thinking.

The iAcquire Ban

iAcquire is a search agency that work for a number of big brands. They were covered on SEOBook a couple of years back due to their link diagnosis tool. In that post Aaron Wall makes the point that it’s probably not in your best interest to hand over link data to a company who themselves offer SEO services. This is why I would never use the Link Tool promoted by SEOMoz in this post that outed a site for doing some pretty crappy link building (the site was already penalised before that post). Maybe that’s being paranoid, but I digress. In that post Aaron also made a connection between Text Link Ads and iAcquire, which suggests it’s no surprise iAcquire offer this kind of service to their clients.

iAcquire made the (pretty stupid) mistake of trying to purchase a link of a blogger, who blogs about social and marketing – Josh Davis. After 30 hours of research Josh spun up this post telling the world of what they were up to. It didn’t take long for that post to find it’s way to Matt Cutts:

and just like that your whole brand disappears into a sea of negativity

One blog posts, a couple of tweets to Matt Cutts, information digging by Google and your business is gone from the SERPs. This is the first time Google has apparently de-indexed an agency and it’s affiliates for selling links.

1. Getting Thrown under the Google Bus is Real Son !!

The world of SEO is now rife with outing. When Google started to de-index blog networks on mass, it sent requests to ask where the unnatural links were coming from. You can now stick up a blog post outing agencies, businesses or firms looking to purchase links and they could be out of the SERPs in no time at all.

For example, I have received two requests for paid links on one of my sites from two companies, both in the gambling sector. Examples below (I received 5 from the same person, who like iAcquire, kept asking for my attention).

First Email

Hi,

I am handling the advertising and promotions for XXX.
My client site would like to advertise on your site in a form of
in-content link advertising.

Maybe you can add my links on your next post?

Please let me know if this is possible and how much will it cost me for
this?

Best regards,
XXX

 Second Email

Hi,

I am hoping we can move forward with regards to our pending discussion on
my inquiry about advertising on [XX]
Please get back to me so we can further discuss the details.

Kind regards,
XXX

If I wanted my 5 minutes of fame, I could simply whip up a post and let it go. This may not be something I have an interest in, but believe me, there are a lot of people who want a bit of that spot light.

2. Take Responsibility for your Agency

It looks as if iAcquire were made to take the complete wrap for this. The client stated they had no knowledge of what iAcquire was doing. If they had zero knowledge, then perhaps whoever was managing them should be fired. The job of any internal resource is to manage their agencies. Look at what your agency is doing, ask for link reports, ask where the links came from and make sure there is something in the contract about financial repercussions if something like this happens. Agencies are less likely to bend the rules if they know there is a monetary penalty for getting caught out. Know what your link building agency is up to. Stories like this are great examples of why big brands need to hire internal resources with online knowledge.

3. Take Responsibility for your Client

If your client is happy for you to bend the rules and this has been agreed on up front, then it should be noted in your contract. When stories like this break, it looks far better for the agency if they can release a statement to say our client had agreed upon our strategy and was in full knowledge of what we were doing. Ok, so you may still get steam rolled by Google, but at least you don’t look like some type of dodgy back street link dealer.

4. Don’t do real stupid things

Can you believe people try to buy links of this site. I mean, there are a lot of stupid SEO consultants out there, don’t be one of them. In this case the wrong type of person was approached for a link. Look at the whois of the site you are approaching. Think, is this person going to through me under the Google bus. If you have any doubts about the results of your approach, go write a guest blog post instead.

5. Don’t believe the hype

The SMX conferences are great. Lots of amazing networking opportunities, lots of amazing best practice sessions on how you can beat competitors with white hat link building. Don’t believe everyone is using what they show at the events to drive results. In competitive keyword spaces, content marketing only get’s you so far. It’s really not that surprising that a large SEO agency is buying links.

Other Posts You Might Enjoy:

1. Keyword Strategy: The Crucial Part of a Winning SEO Strategy #SEO #KeywordStrategy
2. The idea behind Google and how it’s relevant to your SEO Strategy
3. SEO’s are retards

I haven’t had a chance to blog much recently even though there are a LOT of things going on in the world of SEO. It’s pretty crazy right now. But this isn’t a proper blog post, I just wanted to flag a post I recently put live over on SEOMoz. It’s a detailed case study on a project I ran whilst at Salesforce and is based on a presentation I gave in London on the same topic. The post covers an inbound marketing case study and in particular:

- The new B2B Purchase Journey

- The notion of “Get Found”

- How to target specific content personas

- Promotion tactics we used for our inbound marketing project

- Our results

You can read the full post right here.

Other Posts You Might Enjoy:

1. 4 Tips for Improving your Paid Advertising with a great Inbound Marketing Strategy
2. Inbound Marketing – A Happy Home for Some SEO’s ?
3. 5 Best Resources to get Started with Inbound Marketing

It appears Google is taking aim at the long list of blog networks that have sprung up over the past couple of years. Some of the biggest names like Build My Rank have even been shut down. Some of the other names to get hit (according to the IM world) include SEOLinkMonster, High PR Society, Unique Article Wizard, SEONitro, My Article Network, LinkVana and BackLink Canon. With Google also announcing a new “Too Much SEO” penalty, it appears the sky is falling for a lot of SEO folks. Here are 3 important things to note about what’s going on in the land of blog networks:

1. Public vs Private Blog Networks

I have seen a lot of posts that are pointing out private blog networks have been taken down by Google and there is little point in using these ever again. You should keep in mind a service like Build My Rank is not a private blog network, it’s very much a public network. Any network that allows the public to sign up and advertises itself to the masses is not very private. Building your own private link network means you don’t let other SEO/IM folk use it. You are best to just keep it to offline businesses who don’t care about link reports, but just care about results. Will this mean you stay clear of Google’s clutches? Well it really depends on how you build it.

2. The Warnings 

There are some really great insights into the type of warnings people are getting from Google about unnatural links over on this Google+ thread. Your typical message looks like this:

Something I found quite interesting is this thread over on the WarriorForum, which said:

Google replied and said: if you give us details of the SEO services you used this will increase your chance of having the penalty removed.

This would seem to flag whats ever happening is not algorithmic. These kind of blog networks are pretty easy to spot. Lot’s of content, not themed, plastered across random blogs, but my guess is Google are doing something semi manual where they push the button on something that runs out and slaps these networks. With over 700,000 unnatural link messages sent by Google in February alone, I doubt it’s a manual process. As David Harry pointed out on this thread, it’s probably that they always send these messages, but have now lowered the thresholds, or got better at finding these link patters.

3. The Fix

Unfortunately if you are caught up in this mess, there is no easy fix and there are some odd patterns as to how Google is dealing with sites that were using these blog networks. For one, there has been a lot of chatter around one particular link network that appears to have gotten all those who used it, into a spot of bother. SEOLinkMonster seems to be killing a lot of sites. This is a little odd. Most would have thought Google would just have devalued the links acquired from the networks. If they just penalised all sites who were found to have links from the networks, then how easy would it to be to run Negative SEO campaigns for your competitors. Simply dump your competitors into all these networks and watch them burn. But as Richard Hearne rightly points out on this thread:

Google is never going to be this dumb

It may be a case Google can look at a number of other factors including % of quality links vs % of crappy links, existing authority, trust etc when faced with a link profile that has clearly gone awry. This is what most SEO’s would like to believe as Negative SEO would be worse than people using blog networks for their own sites. However, I have seen a site who got the message above and received a penalty the following week, with only around 20 dodgy links, from thousands upon thousands of quality links. The site is a big brand, trusted, old and got a couple of crappy links over a 1 month period.

I would recommend anyone with this problem to get their link profile cleaned up and submit a re-inclusion request. A lot of people are recommending to say nothing as you don’t want to admit to your crime. Well, if you haven’t got a penalty yet, just the message, that could be good advice, but if your site has already been slapped down, you need to take your head out of the sand.

If you have got a penalty, you might want to take a quick read of this post from David Harry and also be sure to check out Tim’s post on his take on what’s going on.

Other Posts You Might Enjoy:

1. Google Farmer / Panda Update – Not about Links – All About Link Building
2. Blog Commenting Spam Might Get You Whacked
3. Trusted Brands get Multiple Listings in Google – Did Affiliates Get Another Kicking

There is a lot of great discussion taking place at the moment around the term “inbound marketing” and what it entails. I have talked previously on inbound marketing vs traditional SEO and recently presented an inbound marketing case study in London based on results we had generated using these tactics. During the recent discussion on SEOMoz, Ian Lurie made a great comment (one that more people should of picked up on):

When presenting my own strategies, I have used the hubspot definitions and counted paid advertising as outbound marketing. But as Ian point’s out above “Good display, smart retargeting and quality paid search all fit”. It makes sense to me. For the purpose of this post I am going to share 5 tips from personal experience of how creating an inbound marketing strategy can improve your paid advertising. If that paid advertising is called outbound marketing, paid advertising or inbound marketing, it doesn’t really matter, what matters is results.

1. Persona Development

Personas are nothing new, they are used in lots of different ways, to make sure you build a product that people want, to make sure your site is designed with target users in mind, and in marketing we develop buyer personas so we can market to them more effectively. The success of your inbound marketing strategy will be driven by content, so one of the first things an inbound marketing strategy will supply you with is buyer personas (may be called content personas). These are usually developed using information from your analytics package, social media monitoring, customer interviews and surveys (both internal and external). These are invaluable when building a paid advertising strategy. You can start to develop a strategy of where your message needs to be and what it needs to say. Does your persona hang out on Facebook, Twitter, news publications, niche publications. What message is going to attract a click and what should your landing pages look like when you attain that click. Grabbing a copy of the personas from the inbound marketing folk will really help focus your paid advertising strategy.

2. Google Retargeting

Although the CTR of display ads seems to be falling YoY, the spend on display seems to be increasing, one thing for sure is the technology around display let’s you do a lot more with your budget now. A great inbound marketing strategy will let you vastly improve your Google retargeting program.

Image credit: AdRoll.com

Retargeting allows you to serve relevant ads to users who have previously visited your site. You can create retargeting lists and assign people to those lists dependent on what pages they have visited. As part of your inbound marketing strategy you should be creating some really great content. This will allow you to offer relevant content like eBooks or whitepapers to users via retargeting, in order to grab contact details so you can drive them into your nurture campaigns. For example:

User A -> Visits your sites and looks at mountain bikes

User A -> Leaves site

User A -> See’s ads for eBook on 10 best holiday locations to mountain bike in Europe

Advertising a piece of content over a product page (e.g. buy this), tends to work better with display. You will get a better CTR and can drive more people into your funnel. Although these people are less “sales ready”, if you have really strong nurture programs (driving them to Facebook, or Email sign up, places they can stay engaged), it could be of more benefit in the long run.

3. LinkedIn Advertising

LinkedIn advertising should be part of most B2B marketing strategies. The ads can appear in two locations:

image credit andreavahl.com

The great things about LinkedIn ads is the targeting options. You have already developed personas and content specifically for them. With LinkedIn ads you can target by industry and job function. This really allows you to create a focused campaign. Keep in mind this awesome guide for writing headlines from CopyBlogger and you should see great results. I have seen LinkedIn ads perform 300% better than a standard display ad.

4. Twitter Advertising

Twitter offers 3 types of advertising, promoted tweets, promoted trends and promoted accounts. At this point in time it’s REALLY expensive to advertise on Twitter (in terms of having to allocate a certain amount of budget per quarter), but it can be pretty effective.

Promoted tweets are a great way to support your inbound marketing strategy.

You can:

a. Promote to followers: You can promote tweets about your best content (I recommend things like eBooks were you are looking to capture a soft lead) and ensure the tweet appears top of your followers feeds when they login. A great way to get instant visibility.

b. People who are like your followers: Better still you can now target users who have similar characteristics to your followers. This is a pretty awesome enhancement from Twitter as it ensures your promoted tweet get’s extra visibility. It’s similar to how Google now let’s your target users who are similar to the retargeting lists you have built.

c. Keywords: Of course you can also target users based on keywords and ensure your tweet appears top for certain searches.

The great thing about sponsored tweets is you can use them to test what type of content resonates with your audience and use that feedback to produce more of what works.

I have also seen really impressive CTR rates from Twitter. A lot better than standard display, but then it’s difficult to a straight comparison as you are offering content, when display campaigns tend to try drive through to an offer.

Anything I have missed, or I should be adding to my paid advertising strategy, please let me know in the comments.

Other Posts You Might Enjoy:

1. Inbound Marketing – A Happy Home for Some SEO’s ?
2. 5 Best Resources to get Started with Inbound Marketing
3. Traditional SEO vs Inbound Marketing – How to Scale your Business Fast

The following is a guest post from Jason Acidre who you should definitly follow via his blog Kaiserthesage and on twitter @jasonacidre

Content marketing has been one of the most powerful marketing strategies over the past years and an approach that’s somehow getting more favorable for search engines in seeding great from crap content over the web – proving it’s a force to be reckoned with.

Tom Critchlow once said that “Now is the time for content marketing” (he blogged about it last week). And I strongly agree, and I think most of us do, because it’s simply the best way to make a brand become known for what it’s great at. People will always know and remember you for the things you teach them to do/act on or for a certain value that only you can provide.

The best thing about this practice is that it taps a lot of significant areas of marketing, wherein this approach can allow a site to improve its online branding, link building/attraction, reach in social media as well as in converting visitors to customers/brand followers, given that there’s a reason for them to be interested and to take action – and that is your content.

However, creating great content is not enough, particularly these days, where everyone – in almost any industry – is already implementing content-centric campaigns, making it more of a battle of how to push content and reach its target audience. That ability is the key to a successful content marketing campaign.
First off, there are several types of content that you can choose to create and promote. Blueglass did an article that defines each of these content formats:

• Lists
• Images/Photos
• Articles
• Infographics
• Interactive Infographics
• Videos
• Video Infographics
• Kinetic Typography
• Cinemagraphs
• Graphs
• Quizzes
• Podcasts

In content creation, it’s important to optimize it for search, by using the keywords that you’re aiming to be searched for by people and by shaping an intent to satisfy its target audience, as it scales the opportunities of the content to achieve far greater links in the future (seeing that it can generate constant traffic through search, and can possibly generate more social shares and links).
Need more reasons to believe that it’s really time to invest on this marketing tactic? Here’s an infographic from Blueglass:

Created by BlueGlass Interactive

Now, once you have a great content done, published and ready to be promoted, you can then start using several methods that I’ll be sharing below to efficiently market, garner links to it and have it rank on search engines.

Linker Outreach

Linker outreach is a social marketing and link acquisition method that initially starts from extracting link as well as social data from web contents that are similar to the content that you’ve just launched, and reaching out to them to basically check out your content, since the likelihood of them sharing your content will be higher, as based from their interests/social activity.

There are many tools that you can use to track social shares such as Topsy, Delicious and through manual Google search (using advanced queries to track social accounts/shares on Google+, Facebook and Stumbleupon). Here are some of the basic steps of implementing a linker outreach campaign:

• Find highly shared content in your industry (have lots of social shares such as tweets, Facebook shares, Google +1s, stumbles, etc…).
• Reverse engineer these social shares by using tools such as Topsy and/or Google search.
• Make a list of influential people (particularly those who have blogs/websites), which also should include their contact details (you have to manually check their websites to find contact information) and put them down in an excel sheet.
• Craft an email template that should only be consisted of the following – where you have found there profile, that they have shared your “competitor’s content”, and that they should check out your content too (as they may also find it useful). Pro tip: Don’t ask them to share your content, since they are linkers, and they already know what to do next after seeing your content.

Related Discussions

Discussions on the web is one of the best source of links, as along the process of building conversations that could lead to relationships, you are also able to promote your content (and your brand as an authority) when sharing your information to people who are actually seeking for it.

There are a lot of forms of discussions that you can participate to on the web such as from forum threads, Q&A sites (like Quora) as well as blogs that pertain to the subject of your content (or the problem in which your content provides a solution).

Leaving a useful comment/contribution to the discussion and referencing to your content for a more comprehensive resource can increase the CTR of your links, which is actually good, since people are finding your link useful.

Leverage Social Sharing

Social sharing is definitely the new link building (or simply a new way for search engines to measure web popularity). Once you have a great content set out for your audience to see, and you have started promoting it, it’s important that you maximize the content’s incoming traffic by making your social buttons very visible.

You can easily entice your visitors to share your content if you have a very compelling title for your content, and have your social buttons as a call to action placed above the fold.

It’s also best to add these social buttons at the end of your content, as there are times that readers tend to forget to share the content after reading the entire entry. So placing it below can put more traction to your social marketing strategy.

If you have a strong and of high value content, it’s easier to get social shares. And given that you’ll be generating a lot of social signals, you are then able to increase its chances of getting higher search rankings (for the keyword it is targeting).

Keep on increasing the amount of the content’s social shares by pushing your efforts to bring visitors to that page, as it eventually builds social proof, which can make your future attempts for link requests easier (since they’ll see that the content was heavily shared via social media).

Build Links through Content Distribution

You can also promote your exclusive content through the content you externally distribute such as guest blogs, slide presentations, press releases, ebooks and/or newsletters.

Make the link perceptible to your external content’s readers by making the strings of text longer and descriptive (like 4 – 6 words describing your content and using partial match anchor texts for it to pass through weight in terms of search rankings), as this format for links have higher chances of getting clicked. The position of the link is also vital, placing it on the anywhere on the first 3 paragraphs can help improve its CTR.

Reach out to people who’ve already linked to you

One of the most efficient (and perhaps the easiest) ways to promote a great content is to reach out to those who already know the value of your works. Of course, those would be the ones who have already linked out or socially shared your content in the past.

You can use Opensiteexplorer.org to track top domains linking to you, and list them all out. Segment your list by categorizing blogs/sites in priority-levels, so you can create different email copies for each level (depending on the difficulty of getting a link/share from them – usually based on the stature/authority of their websites).

Once your list is sorted out, you can start contacting them and let them know about your great piece that could be useful to them or their followers.

Other Posts You Might Enjoy:

1. Get Links Automatically … But you have to PAY !!!
2. Reverse Engineer Spam to create some great Link Opportunities
3. Link Building – Get Ideas and Produce Linkable Content

The growth of inbound marketing and recent Google changes have lead to a lot of changes for SEO over the past year. When people like Rand Fishkin start to use the word “inbound marketing” over “SEO” when describing their work, it does seem like the role of SEO is rapidly changing. The expectations of what a traditional SEO campaign should entail may also change. So just why is inbound marketing starting to become so popular within the SEO community?

Traditional SEO Campign

Only 52% of Google users click on an organic search result found on page one – SlingShot SEO

Most traditional SEO campaigns consist of the following key items:

- Keyword Research / Mapping

- On-Page Optimisation (of content)

- Internal Links

- SEO Site Architecture

- Competitor Analysis

- Link Building

- and Content Strategy ?

Content strategy was often an afterthought. The priority is/was, rank 1st for high volume keywords as these equal traffic. But what if the CTR of organic listings was beginning to drop as a result of Google’s constant meddling with the search results. In this report from SlingShot SEO back in October 2011, they reported organic CTR’s were tumbling, with “Only 52% of Google users click on an organic search result found on page one”. Although those figures cannot be verified, the data pool they used was quite low and it was for a particular market segment, I have personally noticed organic keywords driving less volume to sites, even though their organic position has increased.

How Inbound Marketing can help you grow really fast

The role of an SEO is continually expanding, the traditional SEO strategy above is starting to look a lot different in 2012. Inbound Marketing is about driving permission based traffic from a multitude of sources (image credit from this SEOMoz post):

The big shift being towards content marketing. Great content is at the center of your inbound marketing strategy. If you don’t have this, your destined to fail. But for companies who get it right, they are able to grow at rapid pace. For example:

1) SocialMediaExaminer.com: I was lucky enough to interview Michael Stelzner, founder of SocialMediaExaminer.com, for Salesforce’s new #SocialSuccess site (full interview to be live next week). In that interview he shared some of his growth stats including being in the top six marketing blogs in Ad Age and one of the top two small business blogs on Technorati, along with an email list of 125,000 and Facebook group of 72,000. All of this in just over 2 years. In that interview Mike said

“So, the model that we used was really all about giving super-valuable content that we knew people would want to share via social channels”

It’s obviously not that simple, in the interview Mike goes into the different tactics he used to build Social Media Examiner into such a success, but valuable content is at the heart of a great inbound marketing strategy. I highly recommend Mike’s book Launch, it’s jam packed full of really actionable content to help grow your business.

 
2) Marketo: Marketo were named silicon valleys fastest growing private company last year and are the second fastest growing SaaS company of all time. They are a marketing automation company (or Revenue Performance Management), but are another great example of company putting content at the heart of their strategy. I was lucky to speak with Maria Pergolino (their director of Inbound Marketing) on inbound marketing and content strategy prior to the launch of SocialSuccess. They really know how to do great content marketing. I recommend following her on twitter.

Of course Hubspot are the classic example of inbound marketing at work, but there are a multitude of companies putting these tactics to work in order to scale both their organic visits and business fast.

What’s helping to drive the popularity of Inbound Marketing?

There have been a number of developments over the past year that has helped inbound marketing seem like an attractive option for companies, over and above a traditional SEO strategy.

1. Google Panda – Feb 2011

We have all heard the horror stories of the Google Panda update. Since the original update there have been a number of subsequent updates all aimed at sites with poor content.

2. Google Caffeine / Freshness Update

Both the Google Caffeine update and the Google Freshness update would point towards a consistent content strategy being a good tactic to adopt. Please note, this doesn’t mean “Google Loves Fresh Content”, please remove that from your thinking. For more information on that, see “Keep in Mind“.

3. Bad Link Practices

Last year saw two very public penalties for sites using questionable link practices, both J.C Penny and OverStock suffered the wrath of Google. The tide may begin to turn against anchor text driven strategies and big companies may also feel a lot more at ease with a quality content strategy over a merky link strategy.

4. Google & Bing use Social Signals

In late 2010 Google & Bing signaled they were using social signals to help rank pages. As to what degree is still not clear, however it points towards highly shareable content being useful for both social and search traffic.

5. Google + Launch and Search Plus Your Work

Of course Google + was launched last year as Google stepped up’s it’s attempts to take on Facebook and Twitter in the battle of the social networks. Since then they have been constantly adding new features. The biggest of these being Search Plus Your World. The search results pages have and are changing drastically, it would seem we need to start thinking of how we can create content that solves problems or entertains so we can ensure our site is surfaced front of users.

These changes are all helping to propel a shift in how we construct SEO strategies, but …..

… Keep in Mind

There is NOTHING wrong with link strategies that are focused on driving target anchor text to your site

- Google doesn’t love “fresh” content. It loves quality content and fresh content if relevant for certain search queries. I am sick of hearing the constant mantra of “Google loves fresh content”. If your quality sucks, then having fresh content just means you suck more often.

- There is NOTHING wrong with link strategies that are focused on driving target anchor text to your site. In fact, this is still needed and in some markets is the core part of your overall strategy. Not every set of tactics will work for each market.

- Building a content strategy takes time and resources. It’s an investment and that content also needs to be promoted. Thinking through your strategy prior to content development will save you a lot of problems in the long run.

Do you feel SEO will just become part of an all round inbound marketing role? Would love to hear from you below.

Other Posts You Might Enjoy:

1. 5 Best Resources to get Started with Inbound Marketing
2. 4 Tips for Improving your Paid Advertising with a great Inbound Marketing Strategy
3. Inbound Marketing – A Happy Home for Some SEO’s ?

Google+ is increasingly becoming a social network that brands need to take notice off. Google look to be putting all their eggs into the Google+ basket and are playing to win. From aggressively rolling out new features to making Google+ part of their other properties, it seems the new kid on the block is here to stay. What follows is a quick guide on Google+ and the different areas you should take notice off. Think of it as your Google+ army knife :)

The Growth of  Google+

Most people underestimate the power Google has when it comes to launching new products. The early chart’s showed Google+ grew a lot faster than both Twitter and Facebook, taking only 24 days to reach 20 million users.

Google+ Time to Reach 24 Million

Although it’s difficult to compare the growth of Google+ to Twitter or Facebook (whose growth was  a lot more organic), the early figures were still pretty amazing. Since then Google+ has gone onto acquire 62 million users, with a quarter of these being added in December alone, with one analyst predicting it would end 2012 with 400 million users.

Top 5 Google + Updates so far …

The updates for Google+ have been coming thick and fast since it launched in July 2011. Here are 5 of the most important updates to date:

a. Google+ For Business

In November 2011 Google finally launched business pages for Google+ allowing brands to create their own pages. Google+ business pages provide a number of cool features that can help brands engage with their customers, prospects and fans, including

• Users can add a brand to their circles
• Users can engage with content posted by the brand (+1 it, leave comments, tag the brand in photos)
• Users can share the brand page with their circles (which is good if you want to build up followers)
• And through Hangouts, brands can conduct video calls with their customers and prospects, something Michael Dell does a lot

Click here to view the embedded video.

But wait, that’s not all, in December Google announced a number of other great changes for Google+ pages, which meant management of the page is lot easier as you can have up to 50 named administrators of that page. The page also now shows engagement metrics (people who have +1′d it and added it to circles)

b. Search Plus Your World

On January 10th Danny Sullivan wrote a post on Search Plus your World describing it as “their most radical transformation ever”. Google pushed Google+ into it’s core algorithm, with personal, social and private results now appearing for users logged into Google+ and searching in English. For example, here is what I see when searching for “link building” on Google.com:

You can see the little blue man indicating this is a personal result because I am connected to “Michael Lee Johnson” on Google+ and he shared this post.

This change has lead to some experts like Rand Fishkin declaring every marketer needs a Google+ strategy. When you see results like this for the search term “SEO”, you can see why Rand is so excited by it

This is what I see when I search for “SEO” on Google.com, Rand Fishkin and Danny Sullivan sitting above the PPC ads with a CTA screaming “Learn how you could appear here too”. When brands start to see competitors occupy those spots, they will be forced to figure out what their Google+ strategy is.

c. Integration with Gmail

Estimates in 2010 put the Gmail user base at 193 million and in December of 2011 Google released an update of Gmail that had now been integrated with Google+. One of the biggest changes being your circles from Google+ are available in your gmail account.

d. Google+ Hangouts Support Free Calls

In Dec 2011 (they really got busy in December) Google announced they would be adding free calls to hangouts. This could be a pretty awesome feature for businesses who use them to conduct conferences internally and with clients or prospects.

e. Find my Face

Ok, this may not be the most important update for  businesses or the growth of Google+, but their “Find My Face” feature just sounds cool. This application uses face recognition to help tag people in pictures (if you turn it on).

5 Things to Start Doing Now on Google+

For most businesses, it’s impossible to keep up with the constant change in social media. Instead of losing focus trying to do everything, time is better spent focusing resources on the network that provides the most value to their business. In saying that Google+ shouldn’t be ignored. Here are 5 Google+ goodies you can implement straight away.

1. Google Authorship Markups

Implementing the Google rel=author tag and linking to your Google+ profile is a simple method of building trust for your site/brand and also increasing CTR’s in the SERP.

Just to confirm, this isn’t me I managed to screw up listings from this site and didn’t fix them in time for this post. Get Yoasts full guide here on how to implement these for your WordPress site.

2. Implement the +1 button

This is a really simple one, just add the Google+1 button to your content. You want to ensure people are sharing your content on the Google+ network.

3. Optimise your Google+ Page

Your Google+ should be optimised as per any other landing page that you expect to appear in the search results for relevant keyphrases. Here is a good pic of Colm’s Google+ profile with the important parts highlighted:

SEO Title

Keeping with Googles fondness of personal branding make sure you use your real name and stick up a decent pic that can be pulled into the SERPs.

Meta Description

Your name and your headline will be pulled in first so be sure to get your attributes and reasons for clicking on your list here. You will also see your occupation and current employer.

Links

The links seem to be do-follow. Also, links from the “Other Profiles” and “Contributor” section are being pulled in to the rich snippets so take advantage of these.

4. Guest Posting / Speaking

If you are guest posting on high quality blogs for both link and traffic purposes, ensure to include your Google+ profile and a CTA to ask if people will add you to circles.

5. Segment Correctly

Make sure you use your circles to break users into correct interest groups. This will ensure you share the right type of content with the right type of audience.

25 Inbound Marketing Experts to follow on Google+

So, now you know a little more about Google+, why not get cracking with 25 inbound marketing experts to add to your circles:

1. Rand Fishkin
2. David Harry
3. Cyrus Shepard
4. Will Critchlow
5. Aaron Wall
6. Ian Lurie
7. Jason Acidre
7. HubSpot Page
8. Gianluca Fiorelli
9. Barry Adams
10. Kevin Gibbons
11. Danny Sullivan
12. Matt Cutts
13. Avinash Kaushik
14. Mike Wilton
15. Bill Slawski
16. Michael Stelzner
17. Darren Rowse
18. SocialMediaExaminer
19. Lisa Barone
20. Rishi Lakhani
21. Lee Odden
22. Ann Smarty
23. Rae Hoffman-Dolan
24. Wil Reynolds

And of course, please add me to your circles as I will be spending a lot more time on there, and don’t forgot my partner in crime, Colm is on there as well.

Other Posts You Might Enjoy:

1. Traditional SEO vs Inbound Marketing – How to Scale your Business Fast
2. Will Google Direct Connect for Brand Pages harm Review Sites?
3. 5 Best Resources to get Started with Inbound Marketing

Link Wheels have been around for quite some time. It probably seems odd for anyone to do a post about something as old hat as link wheels when Google have just announced the next stage of social search, Search Plus your World. But there are some markets where the old ways still work. This post is a comprehensive overview of link wheels for anyone who wants to know more and the different variations of how they can be implemented, improved upon or simply bought.

What is a Link Wheel?

A link wheel is a pretty simple concept to explain. It’s basically a process where by you link from an article, profile, blog post, PR release etc to a piece of content on another website and to the page you are trying to rank for a specific keyword. For example, a very basic diagram may look as follows:

Each site (or to be exact, web page on that site) links to the next and to the page you are trying to rank (money page). A closed loop link wheel is one that’s in a perfect circle. Most people using link wheels moved away from closed looped link wheels a number of years back as they felt it was a pattern that could be easily detected by Google and discounted. This is when people started to advocate building open ended link wheels (having to move to my mind map for this):

Open Ended Link Wheel

The above gives a quick overview of what an open ended link wheel may look like. The core point being there is no close. I should note, although I have included a variety of content types linking to each other, in reality it’s difficult to build a link wheel like this, which will be explained a little later.

Key Takeaways:

- Link wheel is a process where by you link from one piece of content to another, with each piece of content also linking to your money page.

- Most links wheels are built as open ended wheels these days

Common Types of Link Wheel

Two of the easiest link wheels to implement are as follows (it’s amazing people will may over $200 for a link wheel service to provide these):

1. Web2.0 Link Wheel (Simple)

The simple Web2.0 link wheel is just 1 article spun out across a number of Web2.0 properties that all link to each other and the money page just as we described above in the open ended version:

Web2.0 Link Wheel

Not very Google Panda friendly as I mentioned in my post on SEO and Inbound Marketing strategies for 2012, but a lot of link wheel services still offer this type of wheel.

There a lot of Web2.0 sites you can use to build this, here are just a few:

Web2.0 Sites for Link Wheel

• Typepad
• Blog
• ShutterFly
• LiveJournal
• 350.com
• Blurty.com
• BlinkWeb.com
• Beep.com
• Devhub.com
• Terapad.com
• Bravehost.com
• Springnote.com
• OpenWiki
• Yolasite
• Tripod
• Webs.com
• Weebly.com
• BraveJournal
• PicoWiki
• Vivity.com
• Live.com
• Quizilla
• Zoomblog
• Jimbo
• Squidoo
• Multiply
• SosBlogs.com
• Webnode
• Terapad
• Angelfire.com
• Buzznet
• Podbean.com
• Springnote.com
• Sixent.com

And so on. The good thing about the list above is they have been pulled from link wheels that are owned by a couple of successful affiliate marketers who appear to be having some success with these. It should be noted, some of these sites may have implemented processes to clean up any sites that appear to have been created for link purposes.

Article Spinner

To get articles spun, you can use the following:

• The Best Spinner (best software on the market for article spinning)
• Odesk / Elance
• Warrior Forum Products / Services

Further Reading

• To understand more about proper article spinning read this great post from Rishi Lakhani

2. Profile Link Wheel (Simple)

The profile link wheel is the exact same concept as above but you are using profiles on forums. Links from forums is still one of the most popular tactics for acquiring anchor text links really quickly. They look as follows:

http://www.magentocommerce.com/boards/member/25976189/

Profile Link Wheel

In the above example, all links point through to money pages. To create a profile link wheel you simply link across to another profile as well. There are a LOT of seo companies that are doing this as their core link building tactic. These kind of links can still provide results.

Profile Sites for Link Wheel

• Everyone uses the same lists, they are from Angelas and Pauls backlinks

5 Ways to build a great Link Wheel

There are some additional steps you can take to build a really strong Link Wheel. You may not have all the resources to implement each of these steps. But even adding a couple to your strategy may improve your results:

1. Variety of Properties

If you are thinking of building a link wheel, it’s good practice to use a number of different content types. If you want to use high quality article directories or guest blog posts, you will need to build your wheel over time. Often these pieces of content will not go live for a couple of days so you are left with the problem of going back over your wheel and adding links. This can make it complex to keep track off:

Cannot add link to Guest Post until it's live

In the above image, we cannot add a link to the guest post until it’s set live. This doesn’t mean you cannot use these sources, you just need to ensure you are tracking it.

Properties for Link Wheels:

• Forums
• Profile Links
• Web 2.0 Sites
• Article Directories Instant (there is no lag between adding article and setting live)
• Posts on your own dropped domains (see this post on building a link network)
• Guest Blog Posts
• Quality Article Directories e.g. Ezine, GoArticles

2. Content – Unique and More than One

If using Web2.0 properties you can theme them around your money site and purchase multiple (unique) articles for each property. This will make them a little more valuable than a spun article sitting on the home page with nothing more than 2 links. For example:

Adding More Unique Content to your Web2.0 Site

An important point about the above graph (obviously there would be a lot more sites in your link wheel) is I am targeting a semi competitive keyword “car insurance quotes online”. Link wheels are best left to target high value, long tail keywords. They are not going to move the needle on really competitive keywords.

Where to get Articles at a Good Price

• Odesk/Elance
• Textbroker
• Warrior Forum Products / Services
• MyGuestBlog - (great place to pick up articles, but you will need to have a proper looking site to post them on).

3. Desgin

If making the effort to purchase unique content for the Web2.0 properties within your link wheel (keep in mind these will be used in conjunction with your other properties listed above), it’s worth getting some cheap design/customization done for each site. This can really make the difference when attempting to get articles from sites like MyGuestBlog.

Where to get Cheap Design?

• Odesk/Elance
• Freelancer.com

4. Build Links to your Link Wheel

This is the one step that could really give your link wheel that extra bit of power. Building links to links is a good tactic no matter what strategy you are implementing. For link wheels it can be an easy way to get a lot of external links pointing to all properties in your link wheel. For example:

Using Blog Network / Micro Workers for Quick Links

Of course you need to imagine this a lot bigger to get any value from it.

Where to get quick links?

• ArticleRanks
• Authority Link Network
• Traffic Kaboom
• MicroWorkers

5. Indexing

The step is to get all your link wheel properties indexed and also the links you point to them. If you are sending a lot of content through blog networks, it’s difficult to find where your links appear. These links are not given to you by default. You can enter a unique string in the content being used and pick it up via Google Alerts.

Best Link Wheel Strategy + Indexing

What are the best tools to use for Indexing?

• SENuke
• Bookmarking Demon
• Social Bot

Where to buy a Link Wheel?

The best two services for purchasing link wheels are:

• SEOLinkWheelers
• Link Wheel.net

So there you have it, a comprehensive guide to link wheels. If you liked this, make sure you add this blog to your RSS feed as I will be providing a lot more guides on link building tactics in 2012.

Other Posts You Might Enjoy:

1. How to Get Started with Your Link Building Campaign
2. Reverse Engineer Spam to create some great Link Opportunities
3. What are my Link Builders Doing? Stay away from Snakes and Ladders

The world of online marketing changes at a crazy speed. Every month brings another thousand blog posts on new strategies you need to consider, changes to Google that may wipe out your business or an SEO prophet claiming they know what you need to be doing right now. 2011 was no different. In fact, it may have been one of the craziest years for those working in online marketing. So just what happened in 2011 and how should it affect your strategy next year? What follows is my own brain dump on this subject with links to some of the most important posts from 2011 (in my opinion) and how they may affect your business in 2012.

On-Site Optimisation

It’s good to know some things remain constant and ensuring your website adheres to best practice on-site optimisation guidelines can still make a difference to your business. It’s important to still do the simple things right:

a. Web Site Structure

For me this is still one of the key areas websites tend to get wrong. A good site structure will ensure  your key pages are accessible by search engines, it will promote good navigation, it will map keywords in logical manner against important pages, it will restrict duplicate content issues and it will be easy for those bots to crawl and index. This is nothing new and this post from Yoast is a great example of how you can structure a small site around keyword research.

Panda Warning: This is the first of our Google Panda warnings. Without doubt the biggest change of last year was the introduction of the Panda. Many sites were totally wiped out by Google’s Panda update and it will have repercussions across a number of areas in 2012. I talked about Google Panda in relation to link building here and how hub pages tried to fix it with sub domains. Google provided subtle hints on what the panda may look for here, Webuildpages (now internetmarketingninjas) provided a series of great articles on the panda and for the latest winners and losers, here is the U.S.A and here are some for the European countries. For this Panda warning it’s now, more than ever, extremely important to reduce your duplicate content to help you stay out of Panda’s clutches. Dr Pete over at SEOMoz had a great post on Duplicate content in a post panda world that you should read.

b. Keyword Usage 

This has always been a critical part of an SEO strategy and something I have wrote a lot about, two examples are here and here. It’s another factor that can make a massive impact on your business and is something that should be taken seriously. For a really great guide on keyword research, check out this guide from ViperChill.

Tips: My favorite keyword tools have not changed much over 2011, they are:

a. Google Keyword Tool

b. Google Insights

c. Uber Suggest

d. Google Suggest

e. SEOMoz Keyword Difficulty Tool (this is new for me)

This is a cool little tool giving you a lot of information on how competitive individual keywords are. The picture below is for “SEO” on Google.com, odd to see  www.seo-usa.org ranking 4th.

SEOMoz Keyword Tool

You can get this tool over at SEOMoz

c. Internal Links

Optimising your internal links by linking from your high value pages to those you are trying to rank is still something I do for all sites I work on. I would add, in 2011 I questioned this tactic over on the SEODojo as I had noticed it didn’t appear to be working consistently. On a couple of sites I ran this tactic there were no visible improvements even though 1 site had hundreds of high value PR pages that were all thematically related to the page I was linking to. Barry Adams gave a good answer:

Tips: For a great way to optimise your internal link navigation, here is a great post from Ken Lyons over on Wordstream

d. Rich Snippets

Rich Snippets is a great way to build trust and authority for your listings in the SERPs. Google, Bing and Yahoo all support Schema.org and if you have content that already fits a format that is supported it’s definitely something I would allocate resources to. There are a couple of additions that could drastically increase your CTR on SERPs:

Authorship Mark-Up: This addition allows you to show a thumbnail image of the author of a particular article, blog post in the SERPs. For more details on implementation, check out this post from Yoast.

Video Embeds: This allows you to show a thumbnail of a video on a particular page in the SERPs, again this is great for CTR:

e. Usability/CRO:

Usability will play an ever important role in your strategy for 2012. The purpose of usability testing is to have people either remotely or within a room, interact with your site and provide feedback on it. This allows you to see how users are using your site and where there may be opportunities to improve performance e.g. get more people to sign up to a form, download a PDF, purchase a product. Gab from SEOROI produced an amazing beginners guide on remote usability testing which is really worth a read.

Panda Warning: Focusing on your page structure, usability of site and reducing ads above the fold are things you need to address in a post Panda world, so allocating budget/resources to usability testing is definitely a good move in 2012.

Site Speed: Another big addition in 2011 was the addition of search speed as a ranking signal. You can use tools like Google Page Speed and WebPageTest.

Google Bot Executing Ajax/Js: Around the start of November, Matt Cutts announced Google had the ability to execute some Ajax/JS and was now indexing Facebook comments. Mike Kings post over on SEOMoz on how Googlebot is a headless browser is a great follow on from this and signals Google can read page structure.

Local Search

Earlier in the year I attended Think with Google in Dublin. The 3 overriding themes of that event were Mobile, Local, Social. This is where businesses should focus resources over the next 5 years. In the SERPs local search is here to stay and dominates the organic results for local specific searches. In some cases it does even when a user has not used a local specific search. Here is a nice round up of the top 10 factors that influence local search. These were:

1. Physical Address in City of Search
2. Manually Owner-verified Place Page
3. Proper Category Associations
4. Volume of Traditional Structured Citations (IYPs, Data Aggregators)
5. Crawlable Address Matching Place Page Address
6. PageRank / Authority of Website Homepage / Highest Ranked Page
7. Quality of Inbound Links to Website(
8. Crawlable Phone Number Matching Place Page Phone Number
9. Local Area Code on Place Page
10. City, State in Places Landing Page Title

Content Marketing

Great content marketing is the process of creating remarkable content that people will link to and share (via social channels). It’s about creating content that maps against different personas, helps funnel people towards a specific goal and helps increase your share of voice around a specific topic. Maybe that’s not the exact definition of it, but it describes some of the work I have done this year around content . Companies like Radian6, Hubspot and Marketo have used content to drastically grow their companies, in the case of Marketo, they are the 2nd fastest growing software as a service company of all time, so they must be doing something right.

a. Developing Content/Buyer Personas

Developing content/buying personas helps you to get a clear picture of who your content is targeting and what they need at each stage of the buying process. This year I was involved in a project where we created content personas for early stage prospects and it provided a lot of useful data. Hubspot have a great article on how to easily create remarkable content with marketing personas. For me, this was one of the most important points from that article:

People, experienced marketers included, tend to jump into content creation from their own perspective

This is true of most people, we write from our own perspective, using our own terminology, instead of thinking about what our prospects need. Hubspot provide some great questions to help get you started on persona development:

• Who are your typical buyers? It’s common for there to be several, but challenge yourself to narrow down on one the first time around. You can build out secondary personas later.
• What are their typical demographics?
• What are their key motivators in life, at work, or at play?
• What are their biggest challenges and obstacles to success, at work or at play?
• How do they consume information today?
• Who influences their decisions?

Over on the Content Marketing Institute they also provided a great template for building a buyer persona. Your content’s job isn’t just to attract prospects to your site, it needs to provide them with the right type of content at each stage of the buying cycle, something I touched on in this article under Content Matrix. Just to repost here the best inforgraphic from last year, Eloquao’s content matrix:

b. Creating Valuable Content / Linkable Assets

Content Marketing is also one of the best ways to generate a lot of high quality links and social signals to your site. With Google using social signals to help them rank content, producing an asset that is widely shared can have a positive impact on your rankings. Also, having more eyeballs on your content should also increase your link count. Linkable assets should be:

- Evergreen content

- Provide a lot of value to your readers

- Targeting your persona group (for a great post on how to use personas for your linkable assets, check out this post from Justin Briggs).

The Content Marketing Institute provided a great check list for creating valuable content here that is really applicable to creating linkable assets. Two of the best examples of this in 2011 were:

- A Noob Guide to Online Marketing (post of 2011 for me)

- SEO Guide to Viral Link Bait and Infographics

- Eurozone Debt: Who owes what to whom (for a full list of interactive infographics check out this post from Richard Baxter)

c. Freshness Update

Google’s Freshness update affects the way Google serves up results for certain searches. In cases where Google deems relevant it will show what it feels are fresher results impacting about 35% of searches. For companies in certain markets, this means producing high value content on a regular basis. Something else to keep in mind is what Tim over at SEOWizz calls FreshRank. That relates to the power of acquiring links on a regular basis (Fresh Links), which the above section on Linkable Assets can really help with.

Panda Warning: Google’s Panda update meant sites with low quality content had their traffic wiped out over night. The panda update wasn’t a page level penalty, it was at the site level, this meant if your site had enough low quality content to tip it over the edge, the whole site would suffer. For 2012 it’s important to have unique content on your site, try produce content that adds value and remove low quality content if applicable.

Link Building

After the JC Penny outing at the start of 2011, I am sure a lot of the bigger brands had a look at what their agencies were doing and changed strategy towards content marketing/linkable assets (I am sure a lot didn’t as well). The problem with that is, you can have a site that attracts a lot of high quality links from reputable sites but it get’s outranked by a site with spammy links but one which has a better anchor text spread. This was something Will Reynolds talked about at Distilleds LinkLove during his presentation. Until this changes I don’t see a huge amount of change in how small to medium sized companies approach link building in 2012:

- Guest Blog Posts (use sites like MyBlogGuest)

- PR Releases

- Niche/Local Directories

- Article Marketing

- High Value Blog Networks (for building links to links)

- Doing smart things with competitors 404

- Doing Competitor Backlink Analysis to try replicate their links

of course this could go on and on, but in general I personally (and I am probably in the minority) don’t feel there have been massive changes in 2011 around this kind of link building except for:

Panda Warning: The results from large content syndication campaigns for link building have been dramatically affected by the Google panda update. Things like spinning articles and submitting to 100s of directories or relying on blog networks or doing large link wheels based on a single article have and will continue to be impacted as those sites get hit by the panda.

Special Mentions

I also need to give a quick mention to a couple of other changes that could really impact your strategy for 2012.

a. Google Analytics

Google have continued to make Google Analytics the best tool in the world (I am slightly biased). They added:

- Google Analytics Multi Funnel Channel allowing you to track a complete transaction

- Performance Tab so you can optimise page speed

- Real Time Analytics so you can track what’s going on in your site in real time

b. Bad Google

Google also made one of the most frustrating changes in 2012, hiding keyword data for people who are logged into Google and visit your site. When first released it was estimated to be affecting between 7% to 14% of searches. Unfortunately for sites I have access to, this is far higher and you would expect to grow if the popularity of Google + keeps growing. This could be a really big hurdle to overcome in 2012 as we struggle to identify what keywords are bringing in the right kind of prospects.

So that’s my shortish round up of 2011. I can’t wait to see what 2012 brings and hope the above provides a little help as you begin to map out your strategy for the new year.

Other Posts You Might Enjoy:

1. Traditional SEO vs Inbound Marketing – How to Scale your Business Fast
2. 4 Tips for Improving your Paid Advertising with a great Inbound Marketing Strategy
3. Keyword Strategy: The Crucial Part of a Winning SEO Strategy #SEO #KeywordStrategy

At this stage the majority of us have a good understanding of Google+ brand pages and the advantages they could have. Many of the initial benefits are were pretty much expected aside a few cool new features like circles and of course the Hangouts. At this early stage we are still learning and discovering how best to use this new platform and incorporate it into our overall inbound marketing strategy. However, as more and more examples of creative pages surface, as marketers, it’s time to get our G+ thinking hats on and ensure we are doing all we can with even the basics that these pages offer.

There many features yet to be rolled out within these pages and there are many, many industry thoughts as to just how important and influential they may become, but for now, we just need to get the basics right.

Producing Content

Posting content regularly is a complete must as publishing inconsistency prevents you from building momentum. Short bursts of content will loose steam and you will end up with an unresponsive audience as you fail to keep them interested in the topics you cover. Another thing to remember is that spark content is going to be returned to users who search within the Google+ search bar so why not work on owning all that related content to your product / service.

Google+ Content

Direct Connect and Photos

First of all, ensure you have opted in to Google+ direct connect by simply adding the snippet of text to your site. This basically means your page will show up in the SERPs when people search for the brand name as well as opting in for the option to be shown in Google Suggest when you enter <+brand name>, this feature will be rolled out to the masses next year.
Another feature these brand pages handle well are the pictures, try to add pictures where possible to enhance your content. When adding a profile pic they actually have a neat little tool that allows you to customize the pic so you can get a bit creative here. Also, include eye catching and related pictures into your profile, you can add up to five here.

Google Direct Connect

Utilizing Circles 

Being another feature unique to Google+ they should really be used correctly to gain all the benefits. Segment your audience and begin targeted content marketing, Time Magazine are a great example of this as they segment by topics so their readers only see the content they want thus increasing the interaction their content receives. Think of international businesses who produce content in many languages – this is the perfect solution!

Recommended Links

Recommended links can be found on the ‘About’ section of a Google+ business page, and it allows you to drive traffic to your website and generate leads from landing pages. Why not link out to some of your strongest content or subdomains.

Recommended links

Other Posts You Might Enjoy:

1. Will Google Direct Connect for Brand Pages harm Review Sites?
2. How to Use Google+ Brand Pages and What Advantages Could they Have?
3. It’s all About the Brand for Google